Joined a local river cleanup and found 47 tires in one morning

I went with a group from my town down to the Brazos River last Saturday. We were only supposed to pick up trash along the bank for a few hours. But someone spotted a tire half buried in the mud and then we just kept finding more. By the end we had pulled out 47 tires plus a bunch of plastic bottles and a weird old shopping cart. It felt really good to do something concrete but also kind of depressing that it was even there in the first place. Has anyone else done a cleanup like this and found way more than you expected?

4 comments

4 Comments

miller.rowan1mo ago

Whoa, that's wild. I mean, I read something recently about how tires are a huge problem in rivers because they trap sediment and mess up the flow for fish and bugs. 47 in just a few hours is insane, but it's also kind of cool you all made that much of a dent. I heard one group in Ohio pulled like 200 out of a single bend in the river last year. It's got to feel good to see the pile, even if it's a bummer to think about how it got there.

diana5121mo ago

Ha, yeah that Ohio group is nuts. But you know what nobody talks about is how those tires can actually become artificial reefs for invasive species like zebra mussels. They latch onto the rubber and then spread everywhere downstream. It's like we're accidentally building highways for the things we don't want.

riley_wood841mo ago

Whoa wait, "highways for the things we don't want" is such a good way to put it. I never even thought about that part with the tires and the mussels. Honestly I always just saw them as trash, not like... accidental transport systems for invasive stuff. That's kind of scary when you think about how much rubber is just sitting in rivers all over the place. Makes you wonder how many other problems we haven't even noticed yet.

sage_green1mo ago

Hang on, is this really as big a deal as everyone's making it? Zebra mussels are already all over the place, like, in every lake and river east of the Mississippi. A few tires might help them move a couple hundred feet faster, but they're already hitching rides on boats and in bilge water anyway. Feels like we're looking for a boogeyman when the real problem is just, you know, people not cleaning their shit off their hulls. I'd rather focus on the actual trash than worry about whether a tire is giving a mussel a shortcut it didn't need.